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Tara Bergin – Proof: a poem-film made in response to The Bloodaxe Poetry Archive
Tara Bergin recorded live at The Poetry School’s Is There A Doctor In The House? PhD festival in March 2014. Read our ‘Meet the Doctors’ interview with Tara here.
Poetry School
Logbook: ‘I am writing this in my tent with my head torch on’
Despite being officially my day off music teaching, today is the only day I can fit in an hour lesson with an adult who comes for an hour lesson on the tuba. I really enjoy teaching this lesson because this pupil always practices – so I can actually see if the things I’ve set for…
Kim Moore
Open Workshop: ‘Putting A Poet In Your Pocket’
Hot on the heels of her ‘Show Us Your Poems’ surgery, current Digital Poet in Residence Kim Moore leads the next in our Open Workshops series… Reading other people’s poetry is vital to keep our own poems alive and breathing. In this workshop, you are going to be carrying around a poet in your pocket,…
Poetry School
‘Tunnelling-out’
Instead let me tell you how to present yourself at all times. With me? Yes. Embrace your inner standing still. The shadows? They’ll stare, they’ll stare. Sweetheart, clay- eyes, you with the sootfall heart. Eat. More. Rocket. Its tinselly fronds will nourish. Redemption Is lying with her feet up in the next road, the moles,…
Pam Thompson
‘She Leaves’
a hollow space, without plump cushions snug as velvety moles, or her clay lamp that dappled the ceiling with shadows, where red and green wires now blast through a gash in the plasterwork like the WHAAM! of a pop art rocket. I slam tall shutters back on themselves and a wane light embraces the dark…
Olivia Dawson
‘A History of Rockets’
Let me tell you this: history is a nonsense. They blanked me out of their books, their stories, their minuscule minds but here is the truth: Take a pinch of stolen black powder, a man in a moon, a love of the light and the blackest of nights – this is the real history of…
Stephanie
A Room of One’s Own
A couple of years ago I decided to have ‘A Room of One’s Own’ tattooed on my lower right forearm. It is extremely hard to explain to people what the words mean – I found this out when I tried to tell the tattooist why I was having this particular tattoo. How to explain that…
Kim Moore‘A Sonnet for Clay Eaters’
Clay crushed under calloused feet and cajoled by hopeful hands is hurled into moulds and sun baked near cottonwood trees. And so, parched bricks are made, one on top another, to build a home. You squat inside, let terra red shadows swaddle your born-bright who stares at you as if seeing God. She pitches arias…
Clare Hepworth-WainEvery Page A Stage
[Movie trailer voice-over style announcement, very deep and gravel throated]: Coming Soon from The Poetry School – Every Page A Stage – starring Jane Draycott! With lots of sessions over two weeks and a real concentration of attention on a topic, we’re delighted to welcome Jane Draycott back to the Poetry School with her Every…
Poetry School
Logbook: ‘There was the time I woke up in the morning and forgot how to walk’
Conversation overheard at running club: Runner A: “Who do you get to wash your windows?” Runner B: “The rain washes my windows” Runner C: “That’s what ‘usbands are for” Runner A: “Well the rain is my ‘usband” *** After watching a documentary about death row in America.. Who would live in a house on the…
Kim MooreNew Homers – a Reading & Writing Course
I’ve had a vivid and unscholarly interest in the Homeric stories since I was a boy. In those days both the battles of the Iliad and Odysseus’s wanderings among monsters and goddesses filled me with a simple, childish sense of wonder. In my early twenties I discovered Patrocleia, the first section of Christopher Logue’s Homer…
Edmund Prestwich
The Plot Inside The Poem
The playwright David Mamet famously said that what we want to know more than anything else is ‘what happens next’. My own obsession with narrative goes back to my writerly roots in theatre and later in film; I’m always looking for the story, even when it isn’t obvious. I’ve been making a study of the…
Jacqueline Saphra
Logbook: ‘My first day as Digital Poet-in-Residence is almost over’
Monday 28th April My first day as Digital Poet-in-Residence is almost over – in 30 minutes to be exact. I felt very different today – not in a turning-into-a-hologram kind of way, as some of my friends have helpfully suggested as being what will happen when I become ‘in-resident’ but in a ‘I-feel-like-a-writer’ kind of…
Kim MooreLive Q&A with Jen Hadfield: 7 May, 1pm
Who listens like lichen listens . . . ‘Lichen’, Jen Hadfield We’re delighted to have an exclusive audience with Jen Hadfield, who will be coming to CAMPUS on May 7 to discuss the startlingly original, Byssus, her latest collection, and her first after the T.S. Eliot prize-winning Nigh-No-Place. Byssus – pronounced ‘bissus’, and meaning the…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Meet the Digital Poet in Residence: Kim Moore
An Interview with Kim Moore
What on earth do poets do all day? It’s never been easy to earn your way as a professional poet, even for the greats. Wallace Stevens sold insurance policies, T S Eliot managed checking accounts, Marianne Moore worked in a library, Maya Angelou sang in nightclubs and Robert Frost was a chicken farmer (and his earliest…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Write more poems this Summer at the Poetry School
It’s just over a week to go before our Summer Term starts. We’ve dozens of new courses and workshops – both face to face and online – to help you wrangle your poems into shape. You can download the whole programme here – or browse the highlights below. Not taken one of our classes before?…
Julia Bird (Poetry School Staff)
Online Q&A panel: ‘The Path to a First Collection’ with Amy Wack, Hannah Lowe, Kim Moore and Neil Astley
The path to a first collection – torturous and winding, or downhill all the way? As part of our CAMPUS Digital Open Day, we’ve put together a powerhouse panel of two poet/editor pairings – Amy Wack & Kim Moore, and Hannah Lowe & Neil Astley – who’ll be here to talk luck versus hard work,…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Open Workshop: ‘Dream Mechanics’
Do you write poetry in your sleep? Are you prone to visions of the night? Do you believe dreams reveals aspects of yourself? You’re not alone – poets from Chaucer to Kleinzahler have long delighted in the fantastical and uncertain landscapes created by our unconscious minds. In this workshop, poet and publisher Tom Chivers will…
Poetry School
CAMPUS Digital Open Day: join us May 7
CAMPUS – the social network for poets – is hosting its first ever Digital Open Day this Wednesday 7 May. If you’re currently a CAMPUS member or thinking about joining our community, this is best way to find out more, interact with other poets, as well as a rare opportunity to peek into our many…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)‘Scientists Count Whales From Space’
At night we listen to the crackle of antennae as we track populations. 10 million species and then these slow, shallow swimmers, pale against wavelengths. Image analysis shows us 55 probable, 23 possible pixels driven to extinction. We should monitor more. On this screen where lost things are un-found, automated systems surprise us with…
Nichola May
The Poetry School / Pighog Shortlist Announcement
The Poetry School and Pighog are pleased to announce the shortlist for their second annual pamphlet competition. Judges Simon Barraclough and Catherine Smith read more than 600 ten-page entries, longlisting 35 of them, and from that longlist, picked the following shortlist of 13. Amy McCauley – Slops Fiona Cartwright – Mrs Darwin’s Egg Francine…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
Podcast: Hannah Lowe reads from ‘Chick’ and a new poem
Last term, Hannah Lowe headlined our Autumn term launch party and read from her debut collection, Chick, where she thrilled the crowd with tales of misadventure from her childhood and illuminated the secret life of her enigmatic, card-playing father. And now, with this podcast, we re-present the whole reading in all its glory. If you…
Will Barrett (Poetry School)
‘The Poetry School has changed my life by providing an international forum for writing and talking about poetry – it is wonderful.’
To see further testimonials from our students, please click here.
Poetry School
Taking a poem for a walk
To celebrate the release of Walking London – our new audio walking tour download – we asked tutor and urban wanderer, Tamar Yoseloff to write about why walking inspires her and how the best ideas always happen on foot. In her brilliant book, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit says: Walking, ideally, is a…
Tamar Yoseloff
‘On the Borders of DTs’
(from The Love Letters of Dylan Thomas) It’s a wild wet day in this tided town and it’s too cold to write. Scarlet ants crawl from the holes in the rocks onto my idle hand. The wind’s blowing hair across my face. I stare from this muddied edge at the shapes of rocks carved in…
Maggie Sawkins